Getting Married eBook

is a substantial one. And so, no doubt, it is;
but the day has gone by for basing laws on the assumption
that a woman is less to a man than his dog, and thereby
encouraging and accepting the standards of the husbands
who buy meat for their bull-pups and leave their wives
and children hungry. That basis is the penalty
we pay for having borrowed our religion from the East,
instead of building up a religion of our own out of
our western inspiration and western sentiment.
The result is that we all believe that our religion
is on its last legs, whereas the truth is that it
is not yet born, though the age walks visibly pregnant
with it. Meanwhile, as women are dragged down
by their oriental servitude to our men, and as, further,
women drag down those who degrade them quite as effectually
as men do, there are moments when it is difficult
to see anything in our sex institutions except a police
des moeurs keeping the field for a competition as
to which sex shall corrupt the other most.

IMPORTANCE OF SENTIMENTAL GRIEVANCE

Any tolerable western divorce law must put the sentimental
grievances first, and should carefully avoid singling
out any ground of divorce in such a way as to create
a convention that persons having that ground are bound
in honor to avail themselves of it. It is generally
admitted that people should not be encouraged to petition
for a divorce in a fit of petulance. What is
not so clearly seen is that neither should they be
encouraged to petition in a fit of jealousy, which
is certainly the most detestable and mischievous of
all the passions that enjoy public credit. Still
less should people who are not jealous be urged to
behave as if they were jealous, and to enter upon duels
and divorce suits in which they have no desire to
be successful. There should be no publication
of the grounds on which a divorce is sought or granted;
and as this would abolish the only means the public
now has of ascertaining that every possible effort
has been made to keep the couple united against their
wills, such privacy will only be tolerated when we
at last admit that the sole and sufficient reason
why people should be granted a divorce is that they
want one. Then there will be no more reports of
divorce cases, no more letters read in court with
an indelicacy that makes every sensitive person shudder
and recoil as from a profanation, no more washing
of household linen, dirty or clean, in public.
We must learn in these matters to mind our own business
and not impose our individual notions of propriety
on one another, even if it carries us to the length
of openly admitting what we are now compelled to assume
silently, that every human being has a right to sexual
experience, and that the law is concerned only with
parentage, which is now a separate matter.